Baseball, tug-of-war, and nine other team medal sports that were phased out of the Summer Games

Reuters

As the nation turns its lonely eyes to the first baseball-free Summer Olympics in two decades, it's hard not to feel the cold ache of loss—suddenly there's a gaping, diamond-shaped hole in our hearts and our TV programming.

Misery does, however, love company, so here's an inventory of some beloved—and some less beloved—team sports that the Olympics abandoned along the way. Some were scratched from the program immediately after their inaugural inclusion (chalk it up to trial and error, or maybe trial and unpopularity); others hung around a while before eventually being discontinued by the IOC. But take heart, baseball fans: At least one made a comeback.

Tug-of-war

Library of Congress

Among the most missed Olympic sports of yesteryear is undoubtedly the tug-of-war event. Its final appearance in the Summer Olympiad was back in 1920 in Antwerp, when an eight-man British team mostly composed of London policemen brought home the gold.

Recent tug-of-war disasters worldwide (i.e., arms torn off in Taipei, nearly severed hands in Colorado, and four lost fingers in Minnesota) are pretty decent indicators of why it may have been retired, many a spectator still clamors for its return: "What would you rather see?" posited ESPN's Jim Caple, in 2009. "Retief Goosen waiting for absolute silence as he leans over his putter? Or eight of our country's finest going against the eight toughest dudes from Iran?"

Doubles events: Doubles croquet, doubles rackets, and tandem cycling

AP Images

It's been a mixed-bag kind of century for two-person teams in the Summer Olympics. For every tan, winsome beach volleyball duo, there's an equivalently sad-eyed pair of out-of-work tandem cyclists.

Doubles croquet was eliminated after a single appearance in 1900; the French gold medalists never actually competed, however, as they were the only competitors in their field. Doubles rackets, the two-person version of a centuries-old indoor European game widely considered an early predecessor of tennis, was a similar swing-and-a-miss eight years later: After Britain swept all three medals in the both the doubles and singles categories, the sport never returned to the Olympic games.

Tandem cycling, on the other hand, enjoyed a longer stay at the Summer Games, with a place on the program from 1906 to 1972. The sport, known for the phenomenal speeds each team of cyclists could generate together, disappeared from the Olympics after the Munich games; the International Olympic Committee, concerned with the "virtually unmanageable proportions" to which the Games had grown, met in Bulgaria in the autumn of 1973 with the intent of trimming down the Olympic program. In the end, the IOC voted to establish limits on the number of competitors in six sports, as well as to abolish tandem cycling from the roster along with nine other sporting events (among them a 50-kilometer walk, four slalom events in kayak racing and canoeing, and the 300-meter distance in rifle shooting). Tandem cycling maintained some momentum after its Olympic demise, but USA Cycling eliminated its tandem race last year.

Baseball

AP Images

Baseball, last seen in the Olympics just four years ago in Beijing, is the latest casualty of an industry-wide battle between professional and national sporting associations. Because the Games take place during the American Major League Baseball season, professional baseball players don't enjoy the same automatic availability as their counterparts in the NBA and the NHL—the latter of which puts its season on hold during the Games (for now). Franchise teams have historically balked at the idea of lending out their top players for a two-week stretch in the middle of the season, and the resulting U.S. teams composed of "prospects and older fringe big leaguers" (as ESPN's Keith Law puts it) have failed to achieve any real dominance in their own national pastime—most notably in 2004, when a team of collegians fell short of even qualifying for the Athens games.

The league's tight grip on its players depleted the talent pool of other Olympic baseball teams throughout the world, too; thus, when each of the 28 existing sports was put to a secret vote by the IOC in 2005, baseball was one of two sports that failed to receive a majority. The other was softball.

Craig Reedie, a British IOC member, told NBC Sports he blamed the lack of major-league baseball players for the sport's exclusion from the 2012 Games. Similarly, Cuban Baseball Federation president Carlos Rodriguez said, "Those who bear most of the blame are the owners of the professional leagues who refuse to free up their ballplayers to compete."

Softball

AP Images

When baseball was booted from the Olympic program in 2005, it took its sister sport with it—a move that shocked even softball's elite.

The sport's surprising exclusion was chalked up to the increasing European influence within the IOC. Europeans reportedly held a near-majority within the Committee—a less-than-promising scenario for a game with larger followings in the Americas and Asia.

Dot Richardson, however, wondered if a force darker than apathy had been at work. "I've always seen in athletics an anti-American sentiment throughout the world—most of it is through jealousy or envy," the two-time gold medal-winning American infielder told NBC Sports after the announcement. Was it anti-American spite? Maybe. Team USA had, after all, nabbed gold medals at every Olympic Games since softball's first inclusion in 1996, and had outscored its opponents 51 to 1 in 2004. (The U.S. women remained undefeated at the Summer Olympics until the gold-medal match in 2008, where they fell 3-1 to Japan.)

Polo

AP Images

Polo experts say their celebrated Persian horse-and-mallet pastime saw its golden age come and go in the first 50 years of the twentieth century. Even in its glory days, though, polo had a spotty attendance record at the Summer Olympics, appearing at only five Games of the first 10 (1900, 1908, 1920, 1924, and 1936).

Polo's heyday ended abruptly in the late 1930s—probably a casualty of World War II, says Brenda Lynn, the director of development at the Museum of Polo in Florida. As times of austerity set in, she says, it became less and less practical to continue international competition of an expensive sport like polo. The logistical hardships and astronomical costs of shipping polo equipment (read: horses) overseas didn't help much, either, and the so-called Sport of Kings was discontinued as an Olympic sport after the 1936 Games. The greater international polo scene went dormant around the same time, and struggled to regain any momentum stateside until the 1970s.

Cricket's popularity was so minimal at the turn of the century that the sport lasted only a single match at the Olympics: In 1900, the only two teams competing were an English and a French team (the latter of which, legend has it, was composed almost entirely of British Embassy employees). England won the gold-medal match by a whopping 158 runs—and after the almost comically one-sided match served as both its Olympic debut and its swan song, Olympic cricket was put out of its misery by the IOC. According to The Guardian, reports after the match summed up the contest as follows: "The French temperament is too excitable to enjoy the game, and no Frenchman can be persuaded to play more than once."

Basque pelota

AP Images

Basque pelota was first and last seen at the Olympics in 1900. The hardcourt game, believed to share roots with modern tennis and handball, remains a beloved pastime in specific parts of France, Spain, and several Latin American countries; outside Europe, a variation of the game is known as jai alai. Enthusiasm for the sport was middling at best at the turn of the century: Only two teams participated in its inaugural Games. Spain beat France in its single Olympic medal match ever, and Basque pelota was scrapped from the lineup soon afterward. Though Basque pelota reappeared as a demonstration sport in Amsterdam in 1924, in Mexico City in 1968, and again in Barcelona in 1992, it would never again award Olympic medals to its competitors.

Lacrosse

Wikimedia

The Olympics have always been a hot spot for geopolitical sports symbolism (see: 1980's Miracle on Ice, Jesse Owens' four gold medals in Nazi Germany, and so on). But lacrosse's Olympic debut had a colonial flavor all its own: Lacrosse originated in the 19th century in the Eastern Woodlands of Canada when English-speaking Montreal frontiersmen adapted the Mohawk ball game of tewaarathon, and according to an article by the University of Victoria's Christine O'Bonsawin, Native Americans and white settlers of the region were facing off in lacrosse as far back as 1844.

So it wasn't sur­prising when, 60 years later, both the Winnipeg Shamrocks and a team known only as the Mohawk Indians showed up to St. Louis to represent Canada in the 1904 Olympics. The Shamrocks traveled back to Canada afterward with gold medals, while the Mohawk Indians took home bronze. Canada earned another gold medal four years later in London.

It's unclear exactly why lacrosse was omitted from subsequent Olympics. Perhaps global interest levels waned. Or perhaps it suffered the same wartime fate as polo, going out of style with the other equipment-intensive sports of the day as resources became scarce. Today, athletic retailers sell lacrosse helmets and sticks for upwards of $200 each, while gloves and pads are both routinely priced in the $100-$150 range. But that hasn't stopped lacrosse from experiencing a massive resurgence in the United States, as youth participation rates stateside nearly tripled in the years between 2001 and 2010.

Rugby union

AP Images

Few early modern Olympic sports saw such even competition among the continents as rugby union. Last seen at the Olympics in 1924, rugby union (a popular version of the sport involving 15 players per team) awarded gold medals once to France, twice to the United States, and once to an Australia-New Zealand team then known as Australasia in its four appearances at the Summer Games. And according to the International Rugby Board, it was the last medal sport to use an oblong ball in the Games.

Like baseball, rugby was the unlucky victim of a shift in the Olympic regime: The "hooligans' game" got the axe after one Count Henri de Baillet-Latour took over as President of the IOC in 1925—legend has it that the Count simply wasn't as fond of the game as his rugby-playing presidential predecessor, the Baron Pierre de Coubertin. Despite some young Dutchmen's best efforts to keep the game alive for the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics, rugby's Olympic aspirations fell by the wayside and were largely forgotten.

That is, until 2009—when, in the new absence of baseball and softball, the IOC voted to reinstate rugby and golf to the field of 28 summer events. Rugby sevens, a variation of rugby played with seven players per team, will be resurrected in the 2016 Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro.

About the Author

Most Popular

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

And if thy brother, a Hebrew man, or a Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee, and serve thee six years; then in the seventh year thou shalt let him go free from thee. And when thou sendest him out free from thee, thou shalt not let him go away empty: thou shalt furnish him liberally out of thy flock, and out of thy floor, and out of thy winepress: of that wherewith the LORD thy God hath blessed thee thou shalt give unto him. And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt, and the LORD thy God redeemed thee: therefore I command thee this thing today.

— Deuteronomy 15: 12–15

Besides the crime which consists in violating the law, and varying from the right rule of reason, whereby a man so far becomes degenerate, and declares himself to quit the principles of human nature, and to be a noxious creature, there is commonly injury done to some person or other, and some other man receives damage by his transgression: in which case he who hath received any damage, has, besides the right of punishment common to him with other men, a particular right to seek reparation.

Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

Most of the big names in futurism are men. What does that mean for the direction we’re all headed?

In the future, everyone’s going to have a robot assistant. That’s the story, at least. And as part of that long-running narrative, Facebook just launched its virtual assistant. They’re calling it Moneypenny—the secretary from the James Bond Films. Which means the symbol of our march forward, once again, ends up being a nod back. In this case, Moneypenny is a send-up to an age when Bond’s womanizing was a symbol of manliness and many women were, no matter what they wanted to be doing, secretaries.

Why can’t people imagine a future without falling into the sexist past? Why does the road ahead keep leading us back to a place that looks like the Tomorrowland of the 1950s? Well, when it comes to Moneypenny, here’s a relevant datapoint: More than two thirds of Facebook employees are men. That’s a ratio reflected among another key group: futurists.

Members of Colombia's younger generation say they “will not torture for tradition.”

MEDELLÍN, Colombia—On a scorching Saturday in February, hundreds of young men and women in Medellín stripped down to their swimsuit bottoms, slathered themselves in black and red paint, and sprawled out on the hot cement in Los Deseos Park in the north of the city. From my vantage point on the roof of a nearby building, the crowd of seminude protesters formed the shape of a bleeding bull—a vivid statement against the centuries-old culture of bullfighting in Colombia.

It wasn’t long ago that Colombia was among the world’s most important countries for bullfighting, due to the quality of its bulls and its large number of matadors. In his 1989 book Colombia: Tierra de Toros (“Colombia: Land of Bulls”), Alberto Lopera chronicled the maturation of the sport that Spanish conquistadors had introduced to South America in the 16th century, from its days as an unorganized brouhaha of bulls and booze in colonial plazas to a more traditional Spanish-style spectacle whose fans filled bullfighting rings across the country.

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.